Assessment of Palm Jumeirah Island’s Construction Effects on the Surrounding Water Quality and Surface Temperatures during 2001–2020

Mohammad Mansourmoghaddam,Iman Rousta,Hao Zhang,Haraldur Olafsson,Hamid Reza Ghafarian Malamiri

doi:10.3390/w14040634

Abstract

Climate change stressors like rising and warmer seas, increased storms and droughts, and acidifying oceans are rapidly threatening coastal zones, which are the world’s most densely inhabited places. This research assesses the effects of Palm Jumeirah Island (PJI) construction on its surrounding water quality and temperature, using Landsat-7 and 8 spectral and thermal bands for the years 2001, 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2020. To aid in this goal, the changes in water spectral reflectance was observed and interpreted, based on previous research and measurements, to discover the correlation between water quality and its spectral reflectance. Then, the sea surface temperature (SST) was calculated for the years under review and changes in water temperature were evaluated. Finally, the Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI) and the Normalized Difference Turbidity Index (NDTI) were calculated to estimate water chlorophyll levels and water turbidity, respectively, and changes were observed and interpreted for the time period under review. The present study showed that the PJI construction not only increased the water reflectance in the 0.5–0.8 µm of wavelength, which can be considered to be the increase of suspended sediments and chlorophyll but the water temperature also increased by 7.5 °C during the 19 years. In addition, a gradual increase in the values of GNDVI (by 0.097–0.129) and NDTI (by 0.118~0.172) were observed. A drop in chlorophyll and suspended sediment spectral reflectance and GNDVI and NDTI values were also observed in 2020 compared to 2019 which can be attributed to the 63 to 82% decrease in tourists in Dubai in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to draw attention to environmental issues by clarifying the effect of creating artificial islands in the sea and our analysis and results are a suitable reference for specialized hydrological and environmental studies based on spectral information and distance measurements, as presented in this paper.

Highlights

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Coastal zones, which are the world’s most densely populated locations, are quickly being threatened by climate change stressors such as rising and warmer seas, greater storms, and droughts [1], and acidifying oceans
The results show that the increase in the Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI) and Normalized Difference Turbidity Index (NDTI) was up to a maximum of 4203% and 2321%, respectively
This study aimed to investigate the effect of Palm Jumeirah Island (PJI)’s construction on the quality of its surrounding waters from 2001 to 2020

Summary

Introduction

Coastal zones, which are the world’s most densely populated locations, are quickly being threatened by climate change stressors such as rising and warmer seas, greater storms, and droughts [1], and acidifying oceans. The substitution of shrimp farming for agriculture in coastal areas has been a paradigm shift, owing to increased shrimp production and changes in land use/land cover [3–5]. Human interventions, such as establishing shrimp [6] farms, not caring for drained swamps [7], aquaculture, commercial navigation, or using areas as sewage and industrial waste disposal sites [8], have caused an increase in the salinity of water near the shores [9]. Because a rise in these pollutants might disrupt the ecology and harm human health and aquatic creature habitats, for those who live on beaches near the ocean, monitoring water-soluble chemicals (including water salinity) is crucial [9,14–16]

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